The Oberon-2 Reflection Model and its Applications

Hanspeter Mössenböck, Christoph Georg Steindl

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Abstract

We describe the reflection model of Oberon-2, a language in the tradition of Pascal and Modula-2. It provides run-time information about the structure of variables, types and procedures and allows the programmer to manipulate the values of variables. The special aspect of the Oberon-2 reflection model is that metainformation is not obtained via metaclasses. It is rather organized as structured sequences of elements stored on a disk,which can be enumerated by an iterator. This results in a simple and uniform access mechanism and keeps the memory overhead to a minimum. We also show a number of challenging applications that have been implemented with this reflection model.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationReflection'99, St. Malo, France
Volume1616
Publication statusPublished - Jul 1999

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)

Fields of science

  • 102 Computer Sciences
  • 102009 Computer simulation
  • 102011 Formal languages
  • 102013 Human-computer interaction
  • 102029 Practical computer science
  • 102022 Software development
  • 102024 Usability research

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